


the sun and his rambles

by strawberrysunflower



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Dan Howell Is A Little Shit, Fluff, M/M, Memes, Sleep talking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 06:14:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29397504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strawberrysunflower/pseuds/strawberrysunflower
Summary: Phil talks in his sleep. Alot. So much so that Dan is starting to worry if anyone were to look at his notes app, they’d think he does hallucinogens on the regular.
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 45
Kudos: 166





	the sun and his rambles

**Author's Note:**

> Somehow I sneezed this nonsense out at 1am lol I have no idea how that happened. Anyway, it’s based on [this tweet](https://strawberry-sunflower.tumblr.com/post/642951379389972480/awed-frog-source) and the title is a play on Rupi Kaur’s poetry book ‘the sun and her flowers’. Enjoy!

Dan isn’t sure when he started documenting Phil’s random unconscious ramblings. Probably not long after they moved into their first place together, and Dan was subjected to Phil’s frustrating sleeping habits on a regular basis. He snores when he’s ill, and he wriggles around like a worm on acid, and he gets up to go for a wee multiple times a night and _always_ jiggles the bed too hard when he throws himself back onto it. But the sleep-talking - now that’s a whole different kettle of fish.

A lot of Phil’s nonsense has become lost through time - he writes most of them onto his notes app, and Dan has gone through more phones than most people go through underwear - but there are still odd scraps of paper saved away in his special box of memories that make sense to literally nobody but Phil’s bed-partner. _‘The monkeys need to stop driving this bloody bus’_ is a favourite, scribbled on a pink Post-it that Dan found on his desk after Phil nodded off waiting for him to edit a gaming channel video. Then there’s one that comes out on special occasions: _‘we need more milk to put out the fire’._ The special occasion being that they do, in fact, need more milk, so Dan will leave that piece of paper pinned to the fridge under their Jamaica magnet for Phil to find and hopefully get the hint.

“I don’t sleep-talk,” Phil insists when Dan grins gleefully at him over a bowl of Crunchy Nut, his phone on the table with his notes app open. “You’re making all this up to convince me I’m going crazy.”

“I’m _not_ making it up,” Dan replies, smacking Phil’s hand away when it inches closer towards the cereal box. “Stop, you greedy bastard, you’ve already had two bowls.”

“I’m hungry!”

“No bloody wonder, the amount of talking you did all night. There are TED Talks shorter than the speech you gave.”

“You’re hilarious, ow, stop, my sides,” Phil deadpans. His hand darts out to grab a handful of dry cornflakes from the top of Dan’s pile. As Dan is spluttering, Phil sticks his tongue out, shoves the cereal into his greedy bastard mouth, and announces, “I _know_ I don’t sleep-talk.”

But Phil _does_ sleep-talk. Constantly. 

It gets worse when he’s stressed, which makes sense. All that nonsense crammed into his weird little brain has to go somewhere, so it all gets blurted out into the darkness during the wee small hours. Sometimes Dan is already awake, wiling away the insomnia by playing Candy Crush or scrolling endlessly through Instagram. A lot of the time Dan is asleep, and he gets startled back into the land of the living after having, “the spaceship, she arrives!” shouted into his ear.

One evening, Phil falls asleep on the sofa with his head in Dan’s lap, after a draining week that has left him more than a little run down. Dan watches an old episode of _RuPaul’s Drag Race_ to pass the time, his fingers absently dragging through Phil’s dark hair over and over again. Suddenly, Phil stirs.

“I don’t understand.”

Dan smirks, looks down at him. He knows Phil is still asleep because his voice takes on this weird, drunken slur when he’s sleep-talking. 

“What don’t you understand, bub?”

Phil lets out a loud, dramatic huff and flops his arm out to indicate whatever he’s imagining behind his closed eyelids. “Where’s all my asparagus gone?” 

Dan has to throw one hand over his mouth to mask his loud snort. He needs to do something with this. Dan is sitting on a veritable _gold mine_ of hilarity - it’s frankly selfish to keep it all to himself. 

So, the next day, armed with a Paint programme on his iMac, the notes on his phone, and plenty of mischievous giddiness, Dan Rupi-Kaur’s this bitch. 

It’s stupid, and Dan knows it. It makes him laugh, which he guesses is the most important thing, but he’s not entirely sure where to go with his masterful creation from here. He can hardly post it to Twitter - that’ll go down well, confirming their relationship through a dumb meme. Dan supposes he could make more, print them out and bind them into a beautiful book of poetry and present it to Phil on his next birthday, but somehow he figures Phil won’t be quite as impressed as he is.

So it sits on his computer, in its own private folder, away from any other eyes.

And yet, it’s addictive. Not even a week later, naked and sweaty and curled up together in post-coital afterglow, Phil rolls into Dan and begins mumbling against his chest. It’s intelligible at first; Dan is half asleep himself, can’t make much more out than Phil is demanding he do something.

“What?” Dan murmurs, voice raspy, wiping grit from one eye.

“You have to- you’ve got to feed the weasel,” Phil slurs back at him, tapping his chest with sleep-drunk movements. Dan huffs and pulls Phil tighter to him, to stop him from squirming around so damn much.

“Why?”

“Otherwise he’ll starve.” 

“Right. Course. Go back to sleep, you freak,” Dan yawns into Phil’s bare shoulder. He doesn’t note it down, takes the lazy man’s option by convincing himself he’ll remember it in the morning and nodding off again. It’s only during an hour-long bath the next day that it hits him, and Dan almost breaks his neck skidding from the bathroom to his desk in only his towel.

They’re not all like this. Sometimes, Phil talks in his sleep and it’s not as fun.

The anxiety nightmares are few and far between, but when they do crop up they can be quite a traumatic experience for both of them. When Dan was going through bouts of crippling, undiagnosed depression back in the early 2010s, and he’d let off steam by taking long, night-time walks, he would slip into the bed in the spare room at three in the morning to avoid waking Phil. More than once he’d jolt awake to a cry of panic, and dart into their room to find Phil thrashing around in the covers as though looking for something, a desperate, breathless mantra of _“don’t do this, don’t do this”_ slipping from his lips in his semi-conscious state. 

One evening they get back from inspecting the progress on their new house, too exhausted to do much more than order a big fuck-off pizza and slob out in bed with Netflix open on one of their laptops. House days are always rife with anxious energy; it’s amazing, of course, in a numb tingly way, to see their forever home finally start to take shape, but it’s terrifying too. Neither of them really know what a load-bearing wall or a combi-boiler is, even when they nod and smile in the correct places when the contractors talk to them.

They should have known better than to finish a stressful day with an overload of carbs, particularly cheese-laden ones that always give Phil stomach cramps and batshit dreams. Sleep comes quickly that night, but Dan is yanked violently from it just as easily by a startled yell.

“The house is falling down!” 

Dan jerks awake, heart racing and a sudden lurch of nausea pushing up from his chest. Phil is shifting next to him, as if urgently trying to eject them from bed. Dan grabs hold of Phil’s wrist and blurts out, “What the fuck?”

“It’s falling, we’ve got to- we have to get out, we-” Phil’s rambling rapidly devolves into quick, shaky breaths as he starts to come to his senses. Dan keeps hold of his wrist, rubbing his thumb against the pulse point, until Phil groans and pulls away to drop his head into his hands.

Dan sighs, turns to flip the bedside light on and runs his palm up and down Phil’s bicep in what he hopes is grounding comfort. “And he’s back in the room.” 

“God, that was horrible. It was so _real_ , it was like…” Phil does an involuntary full-body shudder. “The house started collapsing around us and we couldn’t get out in time.” 

“Fuck. That’d better not be an omen, Mister My-Mum-Says-I’m-Psychic.” 

“Don’t,” Phil whines. He drops his hands and looks at Dan, his eyes wide and shining in the lamp light, lower lip jutted out. “It was really scary. Feel my heart.”

Dan rolls his eyes but reaches across to press his palm flat against Phil’s chest, while Phil places his own hand over top to keep it there. It’s true; Phil’s heart is jack-hammering against his ribs so hard it could break them, and Dan can feel the way he hasn’t quite caught his breath back. Dan huffs out a quiet laugh and pulls him down until they’re both lying amongst the covers again, Phil tucked up under Dan’s chin, Dan’s arms tight around his torso as though daring any more nightmare to try and take hold of his man.

“Dan,” Phil mumbles against his sternum. 

“Mm.”

“You’re not going to write this down in your notes, are you?”

Dan chuckles, traces his fingers along Phil’s spine. “No. I’ll give this one a miss.”

The question does hit Dan, as he’s sat at his computer making his sixteenth poem: how much is too much? 

The thing is, nobody is enjoying the joke but him. And don’t get Dan wrong, he is vastly enjoying the joke, but it feels a little like laughing hysterically into the void and having silence back. So, one morning, after rounding his poems up to a nice, even twenty - something about potatoes having human faces - Dan drags Phil over to the desk and plonks him unceremoniously in front of his computer.

“I’ve been making something.”

Phil’s eyes go wide. “Dan, if you log into an OnlyFans account, I swear to God-”

“No, shut up,” Dan says, giving Phil’s back tiny, impatient slaps. “Look.”

He opens up one of his poems that he made last week, with content born from a five hour long Buffy-and-Chinese-food marathon.

Phil pushes his glasses up his nose and leans in closer, peers at it as though expecting something to happen so that it starts making sense. A confused grin slides up one corner of his mouth and he says, “What is this?”

“It’s you. All your night-time rambling, which you absolutely _do_ do, only I’ve…” Dan waves his hand around, looking for the term, “‘milk and honey’-ed them.”

Phil lets out a bark of surprised laughter. He clicks onto the next one, about a fifty-foot tall Steve running around London like Godzilla, and he shakes his head as his shoulders start trembling with silent giggles.

“So here I am, thinking you’ve been hard at work on your book, bringing you cups of tea and sandwiches, and all this time you’ve been making Insta-poetry of my sleep-talking?” Phil looks up at him, grinning, tongue trapped between his teeth. He tugs on the bottom of Dan’s t-shirt, pulls him close enough that he can slide his hand up inside and tap his knuckles against Dan’s bare stomach. “Why?”

Dan shrugs. “S’funny.”

“You’re a horrible little rat,” Phil says, but the infectious smile still doesn’t leave his face. He clicks through a few more, then hums, pleased, and rests his head against Dan’s hip. “What are you going to do with them all?”

“Dunno. I thought about turning them into a beautiful spiral-bound book for you,” Dan replies, carding his fingers absently through Phil’s hair, pushing it back off his forehead into a rumpled sleepy version of his usual quiff. 

“You could Tweet some. If you wanted.” Phil squints up at him, cheek rubbing against the soft fabric of Dan’s NASA cat nightie, and shrugs. “As much as it pains me to admit it, they are pretty funny.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I might.”

Phil beams at him, then turns back to the collection. He snorts and opens a different one up, the one that Dan loves the absolute most. “Although maybe not this one. Not just yet.”


End file.
